Morning, lovely people - #Trekkies especially. 🖖
Today for #OnlySky I reflect on a solid episode of #StarTrek #StrangeNewWorlds that does a *lot* of work around a classic Trek trope: the character who's having a subjective experience that others can't easily verify.
This is *such* a humanist concept. Phenomenology doesn't always account for how each of us carries a world within. How we show up for each other when words aren't enough is *everything*.
#Humanism #CoSoTV
https://onlysky.media/mclark/how-whats-lost-in-translation-can-be-found-again-in-empathy/
@MLClark I'll be looking forward to your thoughts about the "Lower Decks" crossover.
Apparently there's a SNW musical episode coming too.
Sigh. I know that music has a long history with Trek, but if it isn't Vic Fontaine it's Seven in Paris's holodeck suite or the Doctor singing opera, when all I really want is more drunken Klingon war ballads and melancholic melodies for flute. :(
@MLClark The crossover and the musical come off to me as gimmicks. They have only ten episodes in a season, yet they have to go for gimmicks?
What's next, Spock on water skis jumping over a shark?!
@MLClark Re the flute, methinks that when Sir Patrick passes I may have to create a music montage of his career using "The Inner Light."
Definitely should. The other piece you linked makes me itchy to rewatch For All Mankind. There's a lot of good we could be leaning into as a species, for sure.
That said, if they do a PROPER lower decks episode (like TNG S7E15), maybe framed around Chief Kyle, that could be a decent outing. But if it's Lower Decks in the style of the animated series? I revert to my original "sigh".
@MLClark We're wrapping TNG S7 now (just watched "Masks"). I saw the "Lower Decks" episode and thought, "Huh, that's the right way to do it."
That's what I was HOPING the animated series would be. There are so many solid stories that could have been told from those crew positions - the same way that I was sorely hoping the original pitch for Discovery, of following a lieutenant's vantage point for a limited series, would *actually* stick with a lieutenant's vantage point and power. Not rush Michael up the ranks and into every key story in the cosmos.
Two very lazy approaches to Trek world-building, alack.
@MLClark Supposedly there's a "Starfleet Academy" series in pre-production. No idea what that will be like.
I'm just disappointed by how much NuTrek leans into a style of storytelling that prioritizes the individual over the collaborative enterprise (pun intended) of exploration, discovery, survival, & recovery. Even NuTrek stories that focus on teaching characters why they need to work with others go against the fabric of a future civilization where that lesson has *already* been absorbed.
I miss proactive imagining of a better world.
We have enough "people acting badly" media as is.